Revision as of 16:21, 1 May 2012

Linked Life Data

Best practices in creating, publishing, linking, querying and visualizing linked life data

With the advent of high-throughput experimentation, there has been an explosion of biomedical data on the Internet. While most of the data is available in Web accessible formats (e.g. HTML), many biomedical researchers rely on the use of Web browsers (e.g., Firefox and Internet Explorer) and search engines like Google to browse and search data on the Internet. Such manual browsing and keyword searching approaches are inadequate for large-scale integration of data on the Web. The Semantic Web transforms the Web into a global database or knowledge base that can be accessed by computer programs/agents through a standard data/ontology format. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL) are the W3C standards for encoding data/knowledge. This task group explores how to use RDF and OWL (as well as their enabling technologies) to better enable the computer to represent, identify, publish, query and integrate data/knowledge in the health care and life science domain.